The Writing Prompt Boot Camp

Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 242

For this week’s prompt, write a circus poem. It could be a three-ring circus, media circus, flea circus, or any other interpretation. It could be about people in the circus or those watching the circus. It could be about animals, clowns, tents, vendors, peanuts, etc.

Here’s my attempt at a circus poem:

“How to Make a Clown Car”

First, you need a car–
a small one–
like a VW Beetle,
because it has to be funny,
and the smaller the funnier.

Paint the windows
and remove the interior–
even the door panels–
and strengthen the springs,
because of the weight.

But don’t stop there:
Place the driver on a milk
crate and start shoving
in the clowns with their
expandable luggage,

beach balls, and spring-
loaded giraffe necks.
If you’re lucky, you’ll
get 15 to 20 to fit;
then, you yank them out.

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and can’t remember the last time he went to a circus–or, for that matter, what he witnessed. He’s the author of Solving the World’s Problems, which does include a poem about eight elephants and three clowns in Manhattan (you can use your imagination if you haven’t read it yet). He’s married to the poet Tammy Foster Brewer, who helps him keep track of their five little poets (four boys and one princess). Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.

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138 thoughts on “Wednesday Poetry Prompts: 242”

A spotlight illumed the center ring
Of the big top where the showman stood,
The undisputed circus king,
A puppeteer with lengths of string
That brought the crowds off the bleacher wood.

The candy butchers called aloud,
Ice cold colas and popcorn in hand,
And all the while the glazed eyes of the crowd
Watched as the ringmaster waived and bowed,
Their ears charmed by the circus band.

The clowns pulled gags, and the masses roared,
While artists, with their talents and tricks,
Kept spellbound brains from becoming bored;
Not one soul was to be ignored
When pitching the nickelodeon flicks.

Skilled magicians bedazzled with ease,
Their sleight of hand too quick for eyes
That see as a mindless robot sees,
Led wherever their masters please,
And made to believe their simple lies.

And beyond the entertainment fun,
Beside the glitz, behind the tents
Where bread and circus merged as one,
Were crafty webs the master spun
To ensnare those lacking common sense.

“Look here; look there! No, not behind!”
Screamed circus minions to the willing blind,
The ordered chaos concealing the stunt
That tops them all in this heinous front—
The capture of the brainwashed mind.

They’re vile candies, three times the size
that peanuts deserve to be, an unnatural,
fluorescent orange, the same color as
the large fungus that grew on the side of a tree
in my yard. My wife’s uncle, the mushroom hunter,
called it “Chicken of the Woods”, and harvested it
from us, so I don’t know if it tasted like chicken.
I do know that circus peanuts don’t taste
like peanuts – just sugary, spongy, chewy
marshmallow. I can’t imagine who would really
like them – clowns maybe. They’re oversized
and garish enough to appeal to a clown.
One could stuff several pounds into a clown car
for their next zany road trip. Or maybe we could
feed them to a big purple marshmallow elephant,
lumbering soft and wrinkly in the ring,
while marzipan people watch from the bleachers
made from graham crackers and chocolate bars.
If the big top ever went up in flames,
the whole place would smell like s’mores.

I used to be a Ringmaster
Emceeing a cast of characters,
My jesters, animal trainers, acrobats.
I was the best show in town, changing my hat
On the whims of the rotating audience that sat.
I had all the rabbits I could pull out of a hat,
I was the human cannonball and the high flying act,
I was the lion tamer and the lion too,
The concessions and the clean-up crew,
A clown car that in which I was every kind of fool,
For the exotic, a queen of the Nile,
I even stood in for the Fire-Eater a while …

And on all of them, a costume and a painted smile

And at the heart of it, I wanted to run away
I wanted the surety of myself at the end of the day
The revolving cast was hard to maintain
Noisome, quarrelsome, hard to contain.
And so I dismantled the big tent, derailed the train
Laid them off, all the characters and all the beasts
Gave them their pink slip, the greater & the least.
Sent the elephants out of the room
Handed all the divas a shovel or a broom
Left the freak show hidden behind in a tomb
I did not want a circus to own
Just wanted to be myself, flesh & bone

The last time I climb
the narrow ladder
The last time I stand
on the tiny platform
The last time I shine
in my costume
The last time I hear
the ooohhh’s and aaahhh’s
The last time I tense
my shoulders
The last time I ready
my grip
The last time I launch
into nothing
The last time I connect
with his strong arms
The last time my weight hangs
in his hands
The last time our eyes meet
above the world
The last time we force
ourselves to smile
The last time I hear
the sucking of a thousand breaths
The last time I will land
where I should

This is the last time
I will fly
And the last time I will revel
the triumph

I just got it! They say tell an Englishman a joke on Friday and he will get it in church on Sunday. That is what I did here. I read “Circus” a number of times, but just got the meaning. Well done. An enlightening description. Absolutely wonderful!!

Lear’s wise fool disappears
without adieu or ado
before Act Four,
bearing the weight of his liege lord
the king bereft of his crown
by his own unwise accord.

Subject of thousands
of sophomoric essays—
Was he merely a figment
of the king’s unsteady
imagination, another facet
of the old man’s self?
Was he in truth a she,
Cordelia in disguise,
not gone, in truth, to France
on her unhappy, incomplete
honeymoon as queen?

Perhaps he wandered off
toward Dover, discontented
by the lack of laughs
afforded a man, a clown
by trade. Ironic jests
deplete the spirit, do not
feed it. Did he foretell
his own fate—like Yorick,
his brother on other pages,
chapless, crestfallen.

In my happier dreams,
he saw the great success
of disguise practiced by others
and donned a lord’s cape
and shoes, under the less-
than-watchful eyes—what eyes
remained—of his betters.
I stand corrected; those
who thought themselves
his betters.

Do you remember when we first
went to the circus together
and right there in the Big Top
there was all this craziness going on,
three rings of action:
Dogs balancing
atop beautiful white horses,
Beautiful women balancing atop
strong men, spinning plates
upon sticks,
And what was the third…?
I can never seem to remember
the third, can you?

But the circus wasn’t the only
action that day, do you recall that?
It was the first time I felt my baby
move…you were the one I shared
that miracle with first…
And now, your own babies are
starting university…how can that be?

Tritto! This left me breathless, thinking of how insane a “lion tamer” must be to pretend he or she is in control of the beast of all beasts. How very wise, too, your metaphor for the caged person, controlled by the bully.

I perform for you,
High above the ground
Are you wishing for a net for me?
Posing on a slender bar
Arcing from side to side;
I slip down to hang feet to sky
And spin a whorl of sequins and spandex.
I perform for you
And make your heart leap.
In a moment we almost inhabit the same space,
Then we both come down to earth
And all that is left is popcorn underfoot.

Please do not clown
around with my heart, force
me to balance bowling pins
(and your insecurities)
on my head or chin, toss
me peanuts to make up
for your lack
of attention (when
I was nuts about you), walk
your tightrope without being
there to catch me when I fell
(for you). Spend some time walking
in my over-sized
shoes. You will see
I became my own ring-
master when you left me.

Still traumatized from a gorilla roaming through the grandstands at the State Fair, I couldn’t put it into words. I decided, by the way, to take the liberty of switching to the Fair (since the circus never came to our town). I hope these will count as Haiku since fair season implies autumn:
The birthday girl’s eyes
and face grow red from weeping–
clowns always scare her

I forgot my old name,
traded pearls for funny collars,
got hooked on the hollers
of men with their girls,
girls with their dreams,
and the idea that a world
could be contained in a ring,
shoved into a canon,
and shot like a star into the summer night.

What happened to us
Out there?
Showered in glitter
greasepaint heavy in the air
White flashes of teeth and skin golden under the lights
We lived.
Forever young, forever beautiful
The spotlight was on us
An audience was awaiting a performance
But then we fell.
Crashed through layers, layers of hopes and dreams and glass
Until we lay shattered and broken on the pavement
Our audience pushed us away
And fate pushed us apart.
What happened to us, out there?
When things were still good and right and lit with silver stars?
One star fell
The rest followed quick, too quick
Silver stars danced in the ring
Spotlight on, audience awaiting
Then they fell.
Exploded into glitter and dusted the living with hope that the stars didn’t even know they had
What happened out there?
Were the lights too bright, the crowds too loud
Too many voices whispering promises of dreams?
Or had we already fallen
And it took us this long to see it?

Such keen anticipation for this trip,
a wilderness adventure without cell-phone,
appointments, bills. But here’s an unexpected slip.
On the breathless summit she stands quite alone –
till whistle-blast, badge, man with a tight lip
says she’s in trespass; her country’s lost its grip
on the high-wire act, the government’s shut down.
Who’s in trouble? Surely no politi-clown.

Mother always said it’d scare away the deer.
And the rabbits. And the squirrels. And mice.
I reckoned it was like when Pastor Eldgridge
tried to scare sin out of us, but mostly it
scared us into a different church that accepted
us as heathens and modestly painted hussies.

So I assumed that like us, the deer and rabbits
and squirrels and mice would just saunter
into a different church for food, since any God-
fearing moron would stay clear of lion dung.

Every May when the travelling circus pitched
tents outside town, and the new mothers
thought it good precaution to hide their
babies and jewellery from sight, well, we’d
head to the animal tamer’s tent, and buy
a load of lion and tiger dung. Oh my.

We’d come home, and Dad would spread
it around the garden, shovel it in deep,
while Mother and I pinched our noses.
In all those years I never stepped foot
inside the big tent, just kept outside
to the fringes where they kept the dung.

I can’t say it kept the critters away either,
although it did kill all the strawberries.

This circus is falling down on its knees
The big top is crumbling down.
– Counting Crows, Raining in Baltimore

She’s been walking this tight
rope long enough, some in
-visible line in the sand drawn
chalk soft in tears and tells
and peanut shells. The elephant
is well fed and fat and sassy, un
-said, but eloquently seen. She
means to cannon-catapult herself
far from these trampled stars, but
somehow her feet, sticky sweet,
remain right where they are.

The circus in a tent
was what it should be.
Wind flapped the thick walls
gave sound to the peak.
Canvas is like October.
Those intense molecules
hot in fact peanuts, popcorn, dung
diffused and sequenced and left
through slits and pores. and all
the crowd was light. and all the fliers
were tiny sequins so thin and brave
and so much less real than television made them
where their black and white faces
wore huge human expression.

A tear grease painted here on my face
in case the well’s run dry.
The tears of a clown roll down
my bulbous proboscis, sadness
in hiding, providing the greatest spark
on earth to offer my mirth for the joy
of others. It is laughter they are after.
But, it bothers me that I can’t lighten
my own heart. I fall apart and land
flat on my face. Traces of tears
grease painted here, just in case!